This relates generally to cloud computing and particularly to data centers for cloud computing.
Cloud computing is a large scale distributed computing center including a plurality of servers. The basis for cloud computing is the economy of scale that may be achieved from large data centers with many servers serving a large number of users who have needs that vary over time. The cloud computing data center includes a pool of abstracted, virtualized, dynamically-scalable managed computing cores together with storage, platforms and services. The cloud computing service is delivered on demand to external customers over the Internet.
In cloud computing, customers contract with the cloud service provider to receive cloud services. In some cases, a legally binding contract known as a service level agreement (SLA) may be entered between the cloud service provider and the customer who wants its applications to run on the cloud. The service level agreement may include things such as a maximum response time, an error rate, and a throughput.
Cloud service providers may have difficulty in consistently providing the performance levels that customers expect or have specifically paid for (quality of service) because the cloud service provider generally receives no information about the nature of the workload. Thus, the data center operated by the cloud service provider may be running many workloads that may produce contention. For example, two different workloads from two different customers may contend within the data center because they both require high usage of cache storage. This may slow performance. But because a cloud service provider has no idea about the characteristics of the workload that it receives, it may very difficult for the cloud service provider to efficiently manage and allocate its resources.
One reason for this lack of information is that the way the cloud service works is that generally the cloud service provider gets no information about the workloads that it is receiving on account of the confidentiality of those workloads. Moreover in order to take all corners, it is preferable, to many cloud service users, that the cloud service provider has no information about the workload itself, the nature of the executables, or the nature of the applications themselves.